Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Both articles are by me and a coauthor. The first article (gated; email me for a copy) is a review of the economics literature on contract farming, in which Jeff Bloem and I look at whether participation in contract farming and agricultural value chains improves welfare. On the basis of the literature, our answer is “Most likely, but it’s hard to know for sure.”

Here is the abstract:

In January 2013, I wrote a post titled Quinoa Nonsense, of Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists. That was the second one of my posts to go viral.*

And did that post ever take me places–both figuratively and literally.

It figuratively took me places, because after I wrote that post, Seth Gitter got in touch with me to mention he’d been meaning to look at the effects of the quinoa price spike, and to ask whether I’d be interested in collaborating on that. Because of the same post, The Economist ran an article in their Leaders section last year titled “In praise of quinoa,” in which they were talking about the wonders of international trade, and in which they name-checked me. (In the same article, they also name-checked Saddam Hussein, so make of that what you will.)

And it literally took me places, because Seth and I were soon thereafter flying to Peru to consult for the International Trade Center on the welfare impacts of the quinoa price spike. That was the first of several trips to Peru, a country where I am planning on doing more work as early as next summer.

In my January 2013 post, I ranted against journalists who present uninformed, sloppy thoughts as gospel. My foremost example then was this excerpt from an article in the Guardian:

Here is the eighth of eight lectures I gave at the University of Copenhagen in May for a course titled Causal Inference with Observational Data. This lecture is the second part of my “tricks of the trade” module, which directly stems from this series of posts.